DEICIDA

From his awkward place among these others—with the girl who had spoken leading the way—Crospinal shuffled past rows of cabins, each built upon a thin floor of interlocking girders, smaller versions of the one that had crushed the dream cabinets, outside the pen, with metallic walls and an insulating layer of mylar sheeting. The structures appeared about to collapse, or maybe drift off. In the narrow corridors of the station, no controller approached. After a few turns, the train that had carried him here (like a massive, corrugated hose, when seen from the outside), and the catwalk platforms where they’d disembarked, were left behind. Activity diminished, though he still saw the occasional person, peering half-naked from an open doorway, or standing aside to let him pass. Two struggled with a broken, half-formed spigot, which still had a bit of fight left. A man, older than father had been, but thin and with a bony face, like Crospinal’s, or like the faces of these others surrounding him, slept fetal on the floor. No one here wore uniforms of any kind, yet they didn’t remark upon his own, or try to take it, to save them from microbes. He was in a community of infection and susceptibility; they, in contrast, seemed blasé. Were all these people distorted apparitions, carved from a light that shone on frequencies beyond rational or irrational ken? He had to resist trying to put his hands on those they encountered, not because of the spread of contagions, but because he was afraid he might disrupt their tenuous integrity, or discover that they were not physically there at all.

The air, though warm, was somewhat sickly, and soon the inside of Crospinal’s sinuses stung. He could only attribute this discomfort to be a byproduct of gathered humanity: there was the faintest scent of feces and urine, and though it might have been coming from his own reservoirs, he shuddered to think about what happened to bodily functions if no catheter or any form of processor dealt with it. Debris and grime on every surface, smeared across the flimsy, hard-edged dwellings, across the peoples’ skin, across the path under his feet. No cleaners, no devices. What could that bode?

Crospinal saw a depilated woman (he was sure this time of the gender: there were swellings in this older person, curves he did not have, and a gentleness in the gaze that fell upon him now), with another individual, but altogether naked, crouching in shadows like beasts, bodies grey with dust.

Above, cabins loomed. Most were abandoned, in various states of completion or destruction. He saw the ceiling beyond—

And was startled by the blunt shape of a drone, hovering overhead. He stumbled, but was caught. He recalled the speed of the attack in the garden, and kept his head low. He wanted to bolt. He didn’t speak or ask questions of his companions, who seemed more concerned with ushering him forward than with any sort of airborne menace or surveillance.

The others, in their cowls, remained as silent as they had been since he woke; none seemed fearful, or furtive, or distraught. Should he be led like this, without resistance? The feel of their hands upon him had altered. They were gentle yet insistent. What could he possibly ask, even if the drone were not up there, watching, even if these people spoke?

Sounds of the engines were louder, sporadic, with a grinding quality that set Crospinal’s teeth on edge and reverberated through his body. The burning sensation in his hands and feet had faded, at least, but his bare soles still felt tender and exposed against the texture of the hard, metallic floor.

He imagined that the train had travelled upward to get here. By extension of that logic, the engines, operating at the core of the world, should have been quieter. Yet that was not the case. Were they below the level of the pen now? Had they descended? He had no orientation.

Presently, the floor became neither grille nor composite tile; rather, a dark, fairly smooth surface composed of thin filaments woven together. Almost warm against his skin, and he imagined germs crawling up, inside his uniform, filling what remained. He stepped over expansion grates, through which he glimpsed distant, bright lights and indications of greater depths, as if an entire other world sprawled in the gaps down there—

Startled by a roaring, Crospinal looked suddenly upward again, wildly, to see the train—or one just it—leaving the station, rising as if yanked over the cabins, twining and banking away, moving faster than anything that large and heavy should ever be able to move.

The drone was gone.

Turning a corner, the group still around him, a lone child—wrapped in lengths of black cellophane—saw Crospinal, and stopped, eying Crospinal’s face and old grey uniform with huge eyes; Crospinal too had stopped for a moment to gawp in return at the round, smooth face, and the wonder he saw evident there.

“What year are you?” he asked the child, breathlessly. He could not be sure of the gender. He saw elements of himself, yet the wonder was Luella’s, from the haptics, and not his. “Cognitive leaps? Or before that? What year are you?”

But the girl nudged him forward. “We go, we go.” Pulling at him with strong hands.

Moments later, an old man—even older than father had been, older than Crospinal had imagined possible, whose filthy, skeletal body was bound by strips of the same sort of insulating material father had instructed Crospinal to pull over the both of them when the temperature regulator refused to work, and the pen dropped below zero for two consecutive nights—called them out. Lungs rattling a warning, like hard rain, the old man spoke from where he sat. Crospinal had stopped; the others tried to hustle him along.

“Reasons for anger,” the old man called. “Who are you bringing here? Another sailor? That can’t be a sailor. A pox upon us all.”

Behaviour among people was proving to be a series of unfathomable surprises. Crospinal looked back, the girl tugging at him, but the old man wasn’t even looking anymore.

“Come inside,” she said. “Come now. Come inside.”

Domed structures of the ceiling, visible beyond the last of the scattered cabins, were almost free of polymer mists. Ambients shimmered with a greenish quality here, and the engines at the heart of the world changed tone yet again. After he had stood next to the ancient or disabled elemental on the train, and had stepped off with it, there had been no other machines, no devices other than data orbs whizzing overhead, and the drone. Activities, movements, solely from people—and all of them with the black patterns on the inside of their forearms, which a few held out to him as he passed. Although whether this was meant to impress him or ward him off, he could not tell.

This cabin was indistinguishable among the many. He passed through a narrow aperture, bent, others behind him. Even within the chamber—which had distinct corners and right-angled walls, and was lit by two floating globes—no controller came out to meet him or ask what he required. From a second, darker doorway at the rear of this room came a stench that made Crospinal feel ill.

No ambients suffused the surfaces of the walls. Was this cabin choosing to be silent, like the sustenance station? Was it waiting? The room seemed totally inert. He sensed a stillness, an absence of even the most remote glimmer of intelligence.

Furniture consisted of a simple flat platform on legs, like a primitive table, with no means of locomotion. Two equally immobile stools. He could not even tell what they were made of—certainly not metallic, or a carbon compound.

A filthy counter running the length of one wall was covered in tiny, crumpled tubes. He reached out, pushed at several of these tubes with his still-tingling fingers. Kevlar. Pharmacological in nature, but not from any health dispenser he had known. Devices had not cleared away this trash. No cleaners rested, dormant, charging. As the others crowded behind him (seeing no console to tempt him, no way to contact his girlfriend or attract the angrier manifestations), he understood that he was expected to enter the rear room.

Kicking at more of the Kevlar tubes with his unshod feet as he was nudged forward, encouraged by the girl, Crospinal caught a twinge of another, more subtle scent, but lost it quickly—and what he thought it meant—among the other overwhelming odours.

When he leaned forward to try to see into the gloom, the faint incandescent globes moved also, emitting their cold light over him, and over the spartan contents of—

The underlying scent was ozone: he’d found their father.

Or, rather, their father had found him.

Upon a filthy daybed, certainly a man, similar to but not his father, lay in a sagging uniform, no helmet, whose eyes were glazed and white as bones. He stared blankly at the ceiling. Crospinal shook his head to clear it of roiling memories.

“Reunited,” said the blind father at last. “I saw them lift your dead body and carry it toward the train.”

He spoke with the same tone and quality as Crospinal’s father had.

Crospinal took a step back.

“I watched the machine slink away. They don’t like us, you know. The machines, the smart ones. They desire to be the same, and they pledge to remain nonpartisan. They approach, and they follow, but they can sell us out in an instant. They resent our blood, our meat. They want a soul. Come closer, boy.” One mitt weakly raised, beckoning. The uniform, though ill-fitting, was fresher and in better shape than Crospinal’s.

He did not approach.

Rigid support rings, multiple pockets, and from the back of the father’s head there led a narrow bundle of thin cables, almost hidden by what Crospinal now realized was a mass of grey hair, all spilling over the far side of the mattress and draped over a grey orb the size of his own head. “That’s your gate?” Watching the laboured breathing, the quiet hiss of nutrients, while the ozone, and what it triggered, tried to subsume him. “They told me they had no father.”

After a moment, the man laughed weakly and soundlessly, as if Crospinal’s words had just trickled in and were a good joke. His own white eyes never moved. The prominent rings of the uniform were like bones from a different sort of skeleton altogether. He licked dry lips. “The days of fathers are gone. I’m merely their teacher, their mentor.”

“You have a tether,” said Crospinal, pointing. “Connecting you to a gate, and from there to an info bank. This room is your pen.”

An apparition swirled upward from the man’s chest, rising, assuming the form of a helix in the centre of the room and passing onward, through the ceiling. Crospinal heard the girl, who had not accompanied him past the threshold—but must still have been watching—gasp. This father was smiling. Tendrils wavered over his forehead and subsided as the apparition broke apart.

“I have a set-up here,” he said. “I don’t get the connection I used to, but I’m at peace. I have a few eyes, and many friends, but that does not make me a father.” His own white eyes stared straight up; Crospinal wanted to cover them. “The rats we’ve brought here have a litter of pink embryos; the crows tend their eggs. They protect their fledglings until they can fly. There are, I suppose, aspects of fatherhood within each of us. Motherhood, too, for that matter. Nothing more than a vanished heritage. I do love these people as if they were my own. They’re innocent, in every way. You’ll help them, after I’m gone. You’ll help them remember what it means to be alive, to be civilized, to remain in the light.”

“My father,” Crospinal said, “used to say the same thing. But there’s light out here.”

“Will you stay with them?” The man finally turned his face, tethers rustling. He was utterly blind.

“They don’t need me.”

“You were loved by your passenger, as I love these people, raised from the darkness of this world. You have much in common with us now. You are all creatures of beauty and wonder. Nothing can take that away. No amount of time, no world of unnatural substance, no essence of people dreaming for so long they’ve forgotten what waking life was meant to be.”

Crospinal leaned closer: there was an insignia on the breast of the man’s uniform, an image he could neither make heads nor tails of. Characters around the perimeter, like those he had seen on the crew cabins, outside the garden, but he could not read them. He said, “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I do, Crospinal, I do.”

He stood there, dumbstruck. His name seemed to rebound off the walls and rise, like the haptic had done. He felt disarmed.

“I knew the passenger you called your father. We were friends, a lifetime ago. We woke together. I know he’s no longer alive, and nothing I can express would make you understand that I know how you feel.” Mercifully, the white eyes closed. “I’m also leaving this place, Crospinal, this purgatory, with unfinished business. As all of us must. I’m going to join your, your father.” He smiled. “There are small victories. We will prevail, because we are love, and we love them all. Hold our flames high, Crospinal.”

“You won’t join him,” said Crospinal, making fists at his sides. “You won’t join him anywhere. He’s been blown to pieces. He’s dead and gone.”

The blind man said nothing for some time. Overhead, the dim globes buzzed ineffectively. Conduits gurgled softly to and fro. Then: “We moved in different directions. Your passenger, he had his plastics, and—” a gesture, with his left hand, which could not open, and hung, claw-like, at the end of his thin arm, the sleeve hanging loose “—the jumpsuits. He could call forth ephemera, dispensers. His range was strong. We have a more austere catalogue here, a varied agenda. Mind you, with a full crew . . .”

“How do you know my name?”

His voice was so dry, hardly louder than a whisper. “We have encountered a future no one could have foreseen. We don’t know the past. I’ve carved paths through the darkness for others to follow. Mine led here.” He laughed that quiet, raspy laugh. “I brought the train. Did they tell you?”

“What about my father?” Crospinal said.

“I lost track of him years ago. Real years, human years. Before we started getting weak. Many sailors, as they call us, never found the means to shine, to connect. They sacrificed themselves for all of us. I know parts of your passenger’s story. I know he went as far as he could, and he cleared a large stage. I know of the female, and your struggles.” The man was having trouble with his throat. “No dispensers followed me here. Only a few would grow. So many have been destroyed now. I found it very difficult to locate you, despite my loyal crew. You are the ghost of a ghost. Exhaustion and physical decline hampered my efforts. And, of course, my weakened connection. Tell me something, Crospinal. Tell me: did they bring a crate with them? Did they bring a crate from the train?”

“They brought nothing.” Crospinal was thinking about Luella. Was she the female the blind father had mentioned? Crospinal didn’t want to ask. Had Luella ever come to this place? Had this father, this sick old man on the daybed, ever met her? He let the talking continue, but had just about had enough.

“Ah well. Too late, anyhow, for relief. My influence has been moderate. No other sailors joined me, such as your father, though we were close. I know your company, now. I feel better. I can only aspire that my calling be as powerful as that of your passenger. There must have been peaceful times, Crospinal, before he died. Did he recall much? Did he tell you many stories from the past? Was there a modicum of peace in this chaos?”

Crospinal turned; the girl stood quietly in the doorway, head bowed. From beyond came the sound of muffled voices. They can speak, Crospinal thought. The five boys. . . . 

He told this father the answer he wanted to hear, though Crospinal did not believe it. He said there had been peace, and he watched a thin smile appear on the man’s face.

“Do you have cancer?” Crospinal asked, mostly to wipe the smile off.

“We all have cancer. All of us. The sailors. The passengers. We carry it inside. If we don’t die while we sleep, if we evade the demons when we wake, and if we manage to set up, and connect in any capacity, to begin our mission, cancer waits inside us. Cancer is how we break down. You have nothing like it among crew, or among the batch. I don’t know how many passengers began this journey, nor how many survive to this day, scattered through the darkness. I should know, but I don’t. How many remain asleep, for that matter, inside a stat? So easy to die, trying to understand rules, trying to remember the rules of our past. Establishing crew is paramount. In here—” gesturing again “—and where you were raised, bayside, we brought love, and we’ve been able to receive love in return. We brought light to this world. And you, Crospinal, you shine very bright.”

“Is this the hub?”

The father’s soft laugh was, again, like the sound of leaves in the garden, adjusting, in unison. “This is not the hub. They tell me the hub is far away. This is but a humble outpost, a sky station. There are no consoles, and I could never get any built. We are a small colony, forgotten, but we found our serving of peace.” Again the smile spread. “Forgive my crew, but they are happy. They’ve forgotten their dark heritage, as have you all.”

Crospinal had started to fidget. His fingers clenched and unclenched, and he felt the ruined Dacron crease.

“I see other parts, you know, like your passenger, through the gate. I have eyes on my train. Without a full interface, though, I only ever saw wisps, but I knew where he went. And I can see the cortexes on a good day. The paladins in their coffins. My gate is so small. Charging is difficult.” His lame gesture might have indicated the cabin, the daybed, or perhaps the pharmacological tubes, scattered across every available surface in this room. The man was wasted. “There’s another world, Crospinal. Men like us came from there, but details from before biosis are elusive. Just as your memories of the hub are gone. For you, the cleaned slate was a blessing; for us, a curse. What was a dream, while we slept? What was our past? We floated on a lake, under stars, and drifted for eternity. Tadpoles rising to the surface, ponderous in the cold, April water, mouths working. Not breaking a meniscus. A child looking through a screen window at night while June bugs thumped against the wooden window frame. Were these real? Are these my memories? There’s an island in the lake, not far from the shore. Two dead trees silhouetted, as if drawn in ink, and a black picnic table, thin ribbons of smoke threading upward into a windless sky. My head is full of wonder. Constellations of bright stars.”

Crospinal was looking down at the refuse by his feet.

“Can you sit by this daybed? I have so much to say to you.”

He stepped closer but did not sit. The father had already said too much.

“You have a power. Did he tell you that, Crospinal? Your name. You have a power, and you can help us.” The man blinked, and it seemed that a dark tear ran from the corner of his blind eye.

“Your people,” said Crospinal. “Your children. They called me the deicida.”

“My children,” the man repeated. “Children. The word deicida means god killer, though I never taught them that. Some itinerant.” He laughed weakly, once again. “I know they call you that, though I’ve tried to dispel such crude ideas. There are no gods here. They want you to save them. Are we all like the Akuntsu, looking up from shelters, seeing deities in the turmoil, feeling gods move through the earth, the power of the universe in each bush, and fish, and blade of grass? You are a shaman, naming the newborn chief, distributing souls. I try to explain that there are no longer gods to kill, not here, not anymore, but they consider the twelve cortexes to be forms of deities, and fear them, as if they were gods. I imagine you do, as well. But the paladins are not gods. They were once human, like me. I have one candle to burn and would rather burn it in a land of darkness than in a land flooded with light.” He paused, then struggled as his fingers fumbled, for a third time, to rise. “Please, sit. You’ve come a long way.”

Now Crospinal brushed plastic tubes from the surface of an inert stool next to the daybed and sat, while the energy of another haptic burst in the room, struggling to take hold. The man on the daybed moaned with effort, almost invisible as the rush of fractious images dashed, until Crospinal found himself, dizzy, standing on the green strip before a row of pristine dream cabinets. He looked at the sealed chambers before him, but did not rise. In either direction, more cabinets extended, perhaps two dozen in all. Not the cabinets he knew. Pristine, in a pristine hall. There was the sound of liquid draining. Lights around the door of the closest cabinet went from blue to pale green to white while he watched, and the icons spun.

The sounds of gurgling ceased.

He lifted one hand to touch the nearest cabinet—though of course he could not feel the familiar shape of the handle greet him, no movement at all against his mitt, for they were mere light—

(A sudden lurch: the line of cabinets vanished, revealing the foetid room again, and the blind father, lying ill on the daybed, breathing heavily while indistinct remnants of apparitions stuttered from his body; in the doorway, the girl continued to look on—with the others arrayed behind her, faces hidden by the cowls—open-mouthed in absolute astonishment. But the man moaned, arched his back, and the haptic resumed:)

—the doors of the cabinets hissed open in unison, revealing the glistening forms of men, as large as his father, and as the blind father must have once been, standing erect, sleeping, dreaming, no doubt, all wearing fresh uniforms and glistening blue helmets, all dripping with the same cold fluids that had once embalmed Crospinal.

Pacing, while the ailing father rested fitfully in the back room of the crew cabin, Crospinal said: “He’s dying.”

The haptic depicting the sailors in the cabinets had not been sustainable, the portable gate insufficient for such activity or passage of information. Crospinal was once again confronted by the idea that his father not only knew about dream cabinets, but had emerged from one, and had obscured this fact, intentionally or not, from his son. Possibly, his father had once known much more about Crospinal’s life and the secrets Crospinal thought he had maintained, such as his own visits to the cabinets, and maybe even his doomed romance. Then, as his range and power diminished, so did his knowledge.

Crospinal had stood in numb shock while the girl who spoke fumbled with plastic tubes, pressing them after their father had passed out, to no apparent avail, against the man’s straining neck as he arched and moaned and eventually lay still again. Crospinal watched her limbs, her movements, with an odd sort of intrigue. Without a uniform, the body had elements of awkward beauty, the curves an intimate shape that stirred the pit of him.

Now, emerging sheepishly into the cabin’s front room, trembling—no longer so eager to touch Crospinal, it seemed, let alone approach him—the girl said: “Never before colours. Never such as that. You brought colours.”

Crospinal shrugged. “That was just a crappy haptic, a show. He was trying to tell me a story but he couldn’t finish. He never did that for you, show you those stories? Fathers do that stuff. They get information from the banks, and it goes through the optics into the gates, right into their brain. And then they can project.”

She shook her head. “Never.”

“Does he have dogs?”

Her expression was blank, so Crospinal explained: “Apparitions. Made of light, on waves of pathos, like a haptic, but reflecting his mood. To follow you around. Would he ever send a dog after you?”

“No.”

“Were you born here? Is your womb nearby?”

“I . . . don’t know.” She answered with visible discomfort, voice hardly audible. “Sailor taught us all we know. He taught us. He gives us food and water, and he shows us how to believe. He told us you would change the station, bring us into the light.”

“Has he told you what’s going to happen next?” Frustration made Crospinal pace again. “Do you know what’s happening?” There was a bitter taste in his mouth. “Has he told you about death?”

By this point, only the girl remained. (And the ill man, of course—the father, the sailor—faltering in the back room.) Others from the train, the boys, perhaps frightened by what they had seen, or having played their roles, had, like the haptic, disappeared.

“We’re safe here,” she said.

“You’re not safe. And you’re going to find out soon enough. No matter what you believe.”

The girl repeated, even quieter: “You brought colours.”

Crospinal turned away. He wanted to tear the tethers from this false father’s head, leave this cabin forever, forget he had ever met another person. Were all humans this enigmatic and stubborn? He yearned to return to familiar parts of the world, to the life he’d known, before he ever left the pen, before he left father’s range, but that was impossible. Suddenly he grabbed the girl’s hand, roughly twisting it palm-up, so the black marks on her wrist were visible. In the sharp light of the globe, he saw traces of filaments, subcutaneous, thin wires mapping her forearm. “Did he put this there?”

Not attempting to pull free, she would not even meet his eyes. “We carry it.” Like a breath. “Paladins put it there.”

“My father took mine. Is that what makes your sailor think I can help? Is that why I’m being hunted? He nearly killed himself trying to find me.”

She was clearly terrified of him now. “You move like them,” she whispered. “He told us you would help, but, but you’re hurting me.”

Crospinal let her hand drop. From the back room, the false father began to cough and make other sounds of discomfort. Above the daybed, the broken globe fizzled, dimmed, and harsh shadows moved over the dead furniture.

Draining the reserves of the portable gate had brought a deep, unhealthy slumber upon the father, though he spoke in bursts of a startling tongue, words Crospinal could not understand. The man’s eyes were half open, glowing in the dim room. What looked like foam flecked the bloodless lips.

Crospinal went to the cabin’s entrance and looked out. He was having a hard time breathing. The chestplate popped with each inhale and some seam was jabbing at his chest that he could not dismiss or even locate. Darker outside than it had been. Beyond the ragged line of crew cabins, he discerned the blunt drone, drifting quietly once more—

Much closer, startling him, two people rising, to hurry away. Two of the hooded boys. Had they been hiding, crouching there, hoping to remain unnoticed? Having tried to run away only now, when he came out and looked their way? He lifted his arms. They did not turn to him, but he shouted, “Your teacher is dying. Your father—” spitting the words out “—is a liar. You shouldn’t trust him! He’s not a true father!”

When Crospinal paused, he heard the girl behind him, speaking and, even fainter, the voice of the passenger, who sounded almost lucid now. He must have woken, or perhaps he had feigned his unconsciousness when Crospinal had poked his head in.

“He wants me to teach you,” Crospinal said. The boys had not gone far; stopped, they were listening tensely, with their backs to Crospinal, from a safe distance. They were tall and thin and wore very little. Scraps of nylon and mylar, in a concession to cover limited parts of their flesh. Their bellies, genitals, and buttocks. Cowls were tied about their necks. “I have no lessons to give,” he said. “Go back where you came from.”

The pair hesitated, then obeyed, heading away. Crospinal watched them go before returning inside. In the back room, the girl knelt by the daybed, as she had for Crospinal, in the train. Crospinal leaned through the doorway and watched, breathing heavily, trying to see an indication of conspiracy or plot, until the girl looked at him over her shoulder.

He was astounded by the vulnerability and odd familiarity of her face. He had encountered other people, physical beings, touched them and been touched in return, had felt a range of desires and suspicions. Yet he was left cold. Had the metal rat done this to him? Or was lack of empathy part of his humanity?

“I’m leaving,” he said.

The girl did not reply, except to blink, but the man on the daybed, the false father, staring ahead with his blind eyes, said, “Don’t turn your back. Not again. You would have died for good if we hadn’t retrieved you. There’s a calling. You have a power.”

But Crospinal turned and left the cabin. Their voices continued only briefly. Standing in the corridor outside, between the ranks of cabins, under a dark ceiling, he heard the distant booming of the engines. There was no one else in sight and he wanted to imagine, once again, that no other people existed. He felt the extent of the world, the knowledge and vastness no single life could chart. He felt the yearning.

Death was a monster, under a black, vaulted ceiling, like this. Infinity was scattered with pinpricks of white.

Had his father sailed here, inside a cabinet?

Looking up, Crospinal thought he saw the pale glow from ambients, almost dormant altogether, deep into the night.

He began to walk, choosing the opposite direction from which he had arrived.

A warm breeze rose, caressing his uniform, penetrating the splits and areas worn thin, touching his skin. He stopped to feel this breath of the world, stirring against him, feet on the hard grilles, hesitating.

There were fewer cabins, in less complete states, and soon the surface became patchy, softer, revealing a coarser screen of sorts. He did not feel tired or hungry, though he could not recall the last time he had slept, or eaten. Tonguing the siphon—but not sucking—he climbed a shallow incline, a woven ramp of polymethyl, and was afforded a view of a broad expanse where there were no longer any structures at all, but a smooth, conically sloping crater, glistening in the dark, that led into a pit of blackness so devoid his eyes could not penetrate nor distinguish any detail within. Like an eye of the night, or maybe the source. Breezes he’d felt earlier rose out of this negative space, foul gas from beneath the world. On his face, a light spray of moisture, but when he touched his cheek with tingling fingertips, the ruins of his mitt detected no such dampness.

How long he stayed there, peering at nothing, he would never be sure. He thought he heard voices, maybe even those of a multitude, whispering from far away. He thought he heard his name. The end of the station grew colder, and darker, and the rancid breeze continued to flow from the void, churning slowly, dousing him.

Crospinal had to take a few steps forward and crouch lower to alter his centre of gravity before he really started to slide.